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THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 16, 2015
Franziska Maass's message to her children: "I think a lot about you. I am very lonely."
LETTER FROM BERLIN
THE LAST TRIAL
A great-grandmother, Auschwitz, and the arc of justice.
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
Oskar Gröning, who has become
known as "the bookkeeper from
Auschwitz," was born on June 10, 1921,
in Nienburg, a town about thirty miles
south of Bremen. His father, a textile
worker, was a fierce German nationalist
and a member of Der Stahlhelm (the
Steel Helmet), a paramilitary group that
opposed the Treaty of Versailles and the
Weimar government. While Gröning
was growing up, his family lived next to
a metal shop owned by a Jew. Gröning
used to play marbles with the shop own-
er's daughter, Anne. When the Nazis
were coming to power, picketers appeared
in front of the shop with a banner that
said, "Germans, do not buy from Jews!"
Gröning continued to play marbles with
Anne, only now in a courtyard rather
than out on the street. At the age of
twelve, he joined the Stahlhelm's youth
league. He loved the uniforms and the
military music.
An indi erent student, Gröning
graduated from high school in 1938 and
went to work at a local savings bank. He
became a member of the Nazi Party just
as the war broke out, and then, not long
afterward, volunteered for the Wa en
S.S. He had seen pictures of S.S. men in
magazines and he thought they looked
dashing.
"It was spontaneous enthusiasm, a
sense of not wanting to be the last one
in the game, when the whole thing was
practically over," he recalled more than
six decades later, when asked about the
decision to sign up. A photograph of
Gröning from this period shows a fresh-
faced young man wearing wire-rimmed
glasses and a cap adorned with an eagle
and a skull.
Perhaps because of his banking expe-
rience, Gröning's first assignment with
the S.S. was to work in a payroll o ce.
From there, he was transferred to Ausch-
witz. Once again, his assignment was, in
a manner of speaking, bank-related.The
prisoners brought with them all sorts
of money; Gröning's job was to sift
through it and periodically deliver it
to Berlin.
"I saw practically all the currencies of
the world," he once recounted. "I saw
them from the Italian lira to Spanish
pesetas to Hungarian and Mexican cur-
rencies, from dollars to the English
pound."
Gröning knew that the prisoners
had come to Auschwitz to die. This
didn't much bother him. Jews, he'd been
taught since his days in the Stahlhelm
youth league, were the enemy. They
were conspiring against Germany and
so had to be dealt with. As for the gas
chambers, those were, as he once put
it, just "a tool of waging war---a war
with advanced methods." But certain
things he saw did upset him. One day,
he was stationed on the Auschwitz ramp,
where incoming prisoners were sorted
into groups. When the process was over,
the place, in his description, looked
"just like a fairground.There was lots of
rubbish left. And amongst this rubbish
were people who were ill, who were un-
able to walk." A child lay on the ramp.
A guard pulled the child by the legs, and
"when it screamed, like a sick chicken,
they bashed it against the side of a
truck, so it would shut up." Gröning
complained to his supervisor. If Jews
needed to be eliminated, "then at least
it should be done within a certain frame-
work." The o cer assured him that
such "excesses" were the "exception." At
one point, Gröning requested a transfer.
His request was denied. Finally, toward
the end of 1944, he was assigned to an
active combat unit, which was sent to
fight in the Battle of the Bulge. Gröning
was shot in the foot, and a few months
later he was arrested by the Allies. He
COURTESY MARLENE KOLBERT